Posted August 18, 2014; 11:00 a.m.

by the Office of Communications

Princeton faculty members William Bialek and Mala Murthy have been awarded Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable new technologies to better understand how complex behaviors emerge from the activity of brain circuits. Each award is for $300,000 over a two-year period and is part of NSF's investment in support of President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative. Bialek, the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, received the award as prinicipal investigator in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Murthy, an assistant professor of molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, received the award as principal investigator in the Directorate for Biological Sciences, along with co-principal investigators Bialek and Joshua Shaevitz, an associate professor of physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Thirty-six awards totaling $10.8 million were given. Most of the awarded projects involve interdisciplinary teams of investigators in support of a total of 76 researchers.